Journal (diary) about open collaboration and innovation for academic/practical publications

How ideas are grown on a diffusion gathering of academia

How ideas are grown on a diffusion gathering of academia

by Urska Transformation Lighthouse -
Number of replies: 1

Dear Diary,

There it was. Wednesday, the 19th of August 2020. The day of yet another EUvsVirus Academia meeting. The time we’re always looking forward to.

How so, you may ask? By definition these meetings should be boring and time consuming. What is there to be looking forward to?

Well, the truth is, the tremendous positivity and passion of our fierce leader (as Hila would call her) Renata created in the team, during the EUvsVirus Hackathon and EUvsVirus Matchathon, just keeps persisting. Not only that – it grows and strengthens, as we all join forces (kind of like the care bears did). The word is out there and new members are joining all the time with youthful enthusiasm and a desire to be a part of this new community. (Renata’s intervention: She believes that complex adaptive systems are self-organising and need to be off-the-stage managed or facilitated around aligned individual and collective purpose(s). So, no leaders and all leaders. She cannot wait for the time when all co-author will say I was in charge of … since we are all contributing our best into this world)  

And what a treat it is to read our members Nataliia and Toni thoughts on LinkedIn full of inspiration and care, they spill out of their beautiful minds and souls, usually after our meetings - to make a snapshot of the intensive feeling and intellectual challenge charged to the point of creating free electricity for the entire world, one can freely say. 

If that is so, what is the need to write a journal and add to all these amazing posts and activities that are happening? For one, the main purpose is to note, document and record the steps we take in this process of open collaboration and co-creation. The second reason must have been that, I really wanted to challenge myself and give writing a try… in a team full of writers and remarkable academics. I am challenging myself to be better and to tip my toes a bit out of my comfort zone as well. We are self-motivated to do so, I assure you, that is the unspoken and only criteria for one to fit in this clique. 

So, at 6PM I entered the zoom room that has become our home and place of our gatherings in the past six months. Of course, there were already Renata and Montse fully engaged in an energetic debate, all accompanied by laughter beyond words. At that moment I felt so happy to be at the right time at the right place and excited that I took the unfamiliar role of a “journalist” 

Of course, we started with a first question: how was our summer? The answer should be in one sentence and contain one fruit and one animal together with our summer time adventures. You cannot do this without the happy tune “In the summer time” playing in the back. So you have to give it a thought how to make a sentence like that, it is the warm up exercise that opens the mind, invokes the feelings and sets the scene for our nexus. 

Our optimiser (please be aware that our role titles are probably going to be in a next movie franchise of the Harry Potter type) Montse issued a warning that there are no instructions where to write?! But in parallel, some of us have already started writing in the shared document as we did in the past. Renata was ecstatic because she aims to prove a theory that complex adaptive systems self-organise around a purpose, if given freedom and empowerment. Our answers were filled with creativity and joyfulness. As they should be for the summer. Here are just 2 examples to give you our reader the real impression: “Stuck in the city like a flying mosquito” and “I'm still on vacation, swimming with fishes, waking up with sparrows and hugging my son like a mom bear” and so many more. Then people ask what is it so special about the academia team? There you go! We’re all connected in our passions, our mission and always striving to see the optimistic part of life. 

Lesson learned during this first exercise – glitches appear when we assume everyone knows and understands the instructions. Renata didn’t say where to write the answers and further clarification was needed. Clarity is a necessary ingredient in a team. On the other hand, diametric opposite of this lesson is that the more often we gather in our zoom room, the faster we adopt rules collaboratively without them being explicitly expressed. Most of us started writing within minutes without being asked or told how. We did so intuitively, as was done before and worked. 

In a spirit of co-creation, Renata always sets the scene so that all are engaged in the debate and this time was no different. First, she asked everyone if they would like to share sth, say sth, are having issues … This is a quality I deeply admire in Renata, probably the most. Always selflessly taking care of everyone and making it her mission to ensure that each and every one feels included and important. If there was ever a definition of proper leadership, in my book that would be it. Enabling others to step up and express themselves. One of the topics I coach to managers these days but unfortunately still rarely see it in companies. (Renata’s intervention: she says these things are needed for facilitator to make communication possible, clear up problems along the way, establish bridges, open doors, windows, … as any proper host should do).

Yes, I will be adding different thoughts in this journal. Because I try to observe more than just the process. And because it is my journal wink So, please. Give me the benefit of the freedom always.

As this entire experiment, this diary as well has no initial structure. We’ll be following grounded theory – not having proper direction in mind, just listening to each other, learning from each other having the freedom to settle our own initial steps and rules. We don’t know where it will lead us specifically, we are just navigating through the stars. The beauty of our journey is exactly that. Adapting to the outsides inputs and to each other’s opinions while we move forward to joined results. Results, that today are still beyond our reach and in form of initial conclusions, models and learnings for the future. Results at every step of this journey, how cool is that? 

The grounded theory itself means collecting different data, analysing them and then coming up with goals, solutions and yes, different theories on things. On all sorts of data, we have at our disposal. 

This leads us to our next part of the meeting. By asking us about our issues and challenges, Montse expressed her problem with Mendeley and the list of papers and that she is not sure about the mechanics of it all. We could see heads nodding in agreement. We’ve had several meetings so far with a lot of brainstorming and so many concepts we started from day one. But sometimes we still feel a bit lost in activities. 

Role and accountability diagram and the methodology chart are our main doctrines where everyone participated in the development and confirmed our roles and activities. Small sub-groups were formed and are very active already, others still struggle a bit. But the beauty of this process is also that there is no hard time pressure and being lost a bit is not judged by others as if something is wrong. This is what true open collaboration is all about. When you accept new members, they get hang up in all the hectic as well and it helps to know that whoever joins can participate whenever, on the very segment they choose. Renata’s biggest challenge is: how to enable asynchronous collaboration (because not everyone can accommodate their agenda in a bi-weekly group meeting) so that people work and generate synergy and emergence even if not by talking at the same time/place. Also for onboarding of new collaborates without having to explain for zillionth time the same things. That’s why she is trying with single repository, single all-in-one role and accountability diagram that branches out, single web portal, …

Let just briefly explain what is the diagram of roles and accountabilities. It was the very first thing we produced on one of our initial post Matchathon meeting and we’re already acting on it because it is quite self-explanatory. It uses the Denica method for tactical management (Ref) that designs a system of roles (to be populated by persons, sub-teams) and accountabilities (outcomes - not outputs, they are reliable for) designed around a purpose (check it out, maybe comment what is the main purpose??, hint: it has different colours). When first members started to write in, others co-intuitively followed. But here is a short review of it: in the diagram, roles are in oval and the arrows represent accountability. If you click on any of the roles, you see people working in sub-teams and populating the roles. Both roles and accountabilities can be added, removed, re-populated. This is not in a Gantt chart style where you have specially dedicated who does what, when, but it is more for who is accountable for what. To take responsibility and accountability for deliverables. It is systemic solution. It designs a managerial system around the common purpose of the open academia diffusion team providing the outcome of applicable knowledge on how to co-create value together both to science and practice. Whether we achieved our purpose is to be judged by the customer of such a system (the world, in our case), not by us, complimenting each other abundantly wink

We went through the roles and of course added whoever had an update or volunteered for a new role. Explanation of individual roles opened questions on what a specific role means. Once again it showed how important it is that we all aligned and share our understandings of everything we do together. We often tend to assume what something means and after hearing questions of the other participants we realise we were assuming wrongly. Team alignment and shared understanding will definitely be one of the silver linings in our process. Check out the role we have in our system, soooo necessary when you have such diversity in the project - ‘concept aligner’. And we introduce a glossary to clarify the concepts too, in our portal!

After all the explanations, the debate opened up and participants took over and populated more roles in the team. Each individual shared what he/she is working on and the progress they are making. At this point I do have to say I was impressed by Nataliia’s, Toni’s, Victor’s and Eugenio’s engagement. Always there, always active in different roles. Toni said something that really captured the spirit of the room: “I’m really enjoying this experiment.” And this is the drive behind it all. The updates included a lot of technical issues since we did need to agree upon the channel to chat, cooperate, write ad now I believe we finally have everything. It is all part of framing the team work. 

Hearing all the participants and activities done so far, we could see that the repository is quickly getting filled with data, ideas and concepts we are putting in place. At some point, sub-group leads should take care also of the declutter. To remove the unnecessary data and to dump documents. But this is something for the future to be aware off. We’re still too early in the process and we still need time to see which concepts and theories will take life on its own and then we start building on them. It is still the co-intuiting and co-interpreting stage.

Victor raised another interesting point of meeting in private for members. Of course, this is always an option but the purpose of the academia diffusion team should be as synchronous as possible. His question immediately brought up an idea to also film short explanatory video form in the future and put them in the repository in order to not loose time repeating the guidelines all the time. 

For me personally, this is one of my biggest drivers and why I’m in this team. We are constantly learning from each other, upgrading each other’s ideas, change approaches … And here we return to the purpose of me writing this journal – I am doing it to record in my own words the learning path of our meetings. To do a retrospective of our meetings and put in into my own prospective. Please note, by ‘me’ it can be ‘you’ too. Challenging questions from members of the academia diffusion team keep us on our toes and we are always upgrading every thought, every idea, every feeling we had prior to it. This is magic in action and I really enjoy being a part of it.

This surely is an experiment in open collaboration in science. How to get more than 40 experts engaged and coordinated in co-interpreting so that we do constantly move forward from meeting to meeting. It is a challenge we’ll be tracking with the help of this journal as well. Ability to facilitate such big, dynamic, interactive groups will be worth focusing on by itself. 

The meeting concluded left me so inspired that I can hardly wait for the next one. To learn about heuristics which is my homework from today and I’ll make sure, I’ll write about it in the next journal as well wink

Do me a favour dear reader. If you find a group (of co-dreamers) that challenges you and inspires you with a hopeful view of the future, stick with it. Good things will come out of it and you will learn a lot more about yourself and about your colleagues you now hold dear to your heart. 

Yours truly, 

Urshka, Academia Diffusion Experiment co-dreamer



Keywords:

Tactical management 

Co-intuiting

Co-interpreting

Co-dreaming

Learning from each other

Clarity of instructions

Ability to facilitate

Alignment and shared understanding of things

Clarity 

Heuristics

Anchoring of concepts 

Research of the impact – justification to do what we do

Decluttering 


Links: 

Our portal http://tactical-management-in-complexity.com/course/view.php?id=18 


Tagging: please check our latest posts and we edit with few more persons from the minutes mailing group


Keywords:

Tactical management

Co-intuiting

Co-interpreting

Co-dreaming

Learning from each other

Clarity of instructions

Ability to facilitate

Alignment and shared understanding of things

Clarity

Anchoring of concepts

Research of the impact – justification to do what we do

Decluttering

 

Links:

Our portal http://tactical-management-in-complexity.com/course/view.php?id=18

Tagging: please check our latest posts and we edit with few more persons from the minutes mailing group


(Edited by Admin Renata - original submission Wednesday, 19 August 2020, 4:02 PM)

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